adworld

I was the 15,000,000th visitor to toki‘s blog today. A popunder told me so, and invited me to claim my prize just one click away.

I suppose it’s possible. Her new blog has been up for five days. She’s a friendly girl.

And I’m demonstrably a very lucky guy. Why, just a week or two ago I was the 15,000,000th visitor to katgrrrl‘s site. Jaime, btw, is moving uptown sometime soon to flashy new digs from the same folks who host Kyle’s happy place at sparkology.net. She says first she’s going to make MT her bitch (a quote) and then she’ll go public. I’m hugely excited for her- it was only just over a year ago that I bought myself a djmischiff.com, and I do believe it might be my favorite toy. The blog, of course, not the brochure site up top. That baby hasn’t been updated for almost a year.

So… 15,000,000th. Quite an honour, especially twice in a month. I haven’t actually looked into my prizes yet, but I’m sure they’re fabulous. Maybe next time I win I’ll go check it out.

Advertising on the web. Most people shreik, “SPAM!! EVIL DIE MURDER KILL!! SPAAAAAAAAAM!” For what it’s worth and before I go any further, these are the same people that buy Nike, Sony, and Ford. Because of the name. They saw it on tv. They were told their lives would be better if they just buy this record. (obscure song reference, sorry)

Anyway, I tend to get convoluted and random when I talk about this subject because I’ve been over it so many times. First: without advertising consumption would fall off, and without consumption we have no economy and the world plunges into… what?

We’ll get to that. Stay focused. Since the late nineteenth century and the advent of cheap production of all kinds, it has been necessary to compete for our business. If you want our money, you have to make us want your product more than the other guy’s.

For a while it was enough to have a better product. Then it was about the service you got with that product. But inevitably a new angle was needed.

Lifestyle.

With OUR product you will be glamorous and successful. Why? We don’t know, but just look at the life led by these folks who already have one. Happy family, lots of free time, the envy of all their neighbours. Just by owning OUR product your life will be complete and all your dreams will be fulfilled.

This has been such an overwhelmingly successful strategy for so long that kids get killed for their sneakers, and large dollar purchases (appliances & such) have a built-in seven year lifespan. You need NEW and you need ULTIMATE and you need EXTREME.

And yes, after a while this became so accepted and so natural that only with great effort and diabolical genious we managed to tweak that just one notch further.

Fear.

This is the big one. You can’t trump Fear. Fear drives women’s health and men’s fashion. You are TERRIFIED of being below average. Hell, you HATE being average. This is a FACT. You WANT the WORLD to ENVY YOU. You starve yourself, but that’s not enough. There’s no money in that alone. The marketers could not care less if you starved yourself to death except they want your MONEY. So you are told FIFTY THOUSAND TIMES A DAY that you are less than perfect. Far from perfect. A fat, old, wrinkly and ugly slob. Only with OUR PRODUCT can you achieve acceptance in your peer group. In fact, with OUR product you can ditch your sub-standard friends and mingle with the rich and famous.

You’re ugly. Buy makeup.
You’re fat. Buy equipment.
You’re wrinkly. Get surgery.
You’re a slob. Buy clothes.
You’re old. Spend your money and die.

If you don’t spend, the economy collapses. You’d be stunned how fast it would collapse if we all “made do”.

Even if we chose to shop smarter, buying better designed products and demanding with our dollars real quality… the system as it stands now could not take it.

Millions of layoffs. Millions. From fruit pickers to car designers to lowly copy writers for newspapers. All over the developed world. Millions of people out of a job in about a week.

And yes, that ripple slams into the safety net and within another week governments are cancelling social assistance. Why cancel? Why not develop work programs? Answer: what for? No one’s buying anything. And now no one CAN buy anything.

Where did the money go?

No one, you see, has saved any. They used to. Just a decade ago Canadians saved more than Americans, and even Americans were smarter with their money. Marketers, however, are smarter. They’ve even sold you on the idea that the market is fine, the economy is fine, your job is secure and if it isn’t so what? You’re fine. In fact, you’re doing your part to support the economy by spending. You’ve got three credit cards and you owe money on all of them. The average Canadian owes $12,000, $7g of that on credit cards.

Interest rates and prices across the board skyrocket as the upper echelons scramble to preserve their margins. Massive layoffs hit the banks, the keystone corporations, the private sector is bedlam.

The money sweeps upward as, in the panic, everyone grabs on to what they’ve got, and without recirculation that means 99% of us have NOTHING.

All that green up at the top, of course, is pretty much useless. Prices are insane. The governments step in at first to encourage everyone to spend. “Buy American!” and such. But everyone has heard of The Depression, and no one gives up the green. In desperation the governments force price controls, just a few weeks too late to really save anyone from a long decade of slow and painful recovery.

Meanwhile, third-world countries (those that aren’t ruled by US-installed capitalist governments or equally flawed communists) continue as they were, relatively unaffected. No more familiar with Coca-Cola than they were a hundred years ago. A village sinks a new well and enjoys prosperity because they can now raise more goats.

I encourage smart spending, of course. But I also realize we depend on rampant thoughtless consumerism, the attempt to buy an unattainable lifestyle, a manufactured desire to pursue a level of perfection you neither need or really want. It is because of consumerism (read: capitalism) that we have the lifestyles we enjoy now. Competition necessarily breeds quality if you can find it amongst all the cheap thrills. You have to acknowledge that the system has worked in a lot of ways.

Just don’t go mucking it up by spending your money on education or world peace.

To come full circle: advertising on the web. People bitch, but seriously we only notice because we’ve given them a voice. On the web. Paid for by advertising. On the web.

As long as you demand your free access you’ll have to put up with a few ads. If you were smart you’d be yelling for accountability, where advertisers and publishers have to answer for their actions. “No unsolicited commercial email” (spam) is an argument just as valid in your mailbox as your inbox, but you’ll happily take 7 minutes of free primetime TV for 2 minutes of advertising, so get used to the same model showing up online. If you want ad-free content, pay up or shut up. Publishers have to pay the bills somehow, same as the rest of us.

What’s more is that you should pay attention to those ads. Click through. Spend some money. Spend smart, but spend. Online. That’s how webmasters make their living. It’s actually a far more efficient system than TV, because you have direct control over who gets your money. You can choose to support the sites you like just by clicking through on the ads there. It’s empowerment, not oppression. It’s more control than you’re likely to get anywhere else in the developed world these days.

Vive la Interweb.